Tag Archives: social media

Recently I’ve seen a headline or two suggesting Twitter is dying. Those pieces might suggest that it’s for the following reasons. I haven’t clicked many links to find out, but thought I’d add some thoughts here in the hope that there is a groundswell of consensus around the issue.

Apparently over in the US Twitter is really struggling. It failed to add any new users for the second quarter in a row. At the end of September, Twitter had a core audience of 307 million active users, adding just 3 million worldwide during the three months since June. Mass market appeal it seems is no longer there.

Most online social communities depend upon reciprocation, following the activity of others in order to be followed back; a sometimes blind and urgent focus on simply driving up those important numbers. This is a call to pause for thought.

Much of business today revolves around metrics, data, numbers. The mass of people online means a wealth of data, new job roles designed to exploit that data and professionals desperately scrambling to keep their skills up to date. It’s not hard to see why data has been dubbed the oil of this century.

This is largely for the good, for transparency and accountability, for conversions and web traffic, unambiguous black and white. Close measurement and analysis has become meaningful and arguably most meaningful where it’s most niche, where there is specifically developed software within a sector; where metrics are fluid and have serious value.Continue reading →

Today’s virtual, digital world usually creates a comfortable distance for users. This is a comfortable distance that suddenly disappears when you’re actually in a conference room with other people. If you fall into a conversation and grow bored, you can’t click or swipe for them to go away.

While the title of the annual market analyst forum suggested a certain current harmony between the cloud, social media and analytics, a series of analyst viewpoints indicated that the developing multi-device landscape might be a little more complicated.

In a digital world where everything is social and connected, will individual, standalone websites forever remain essential business tools? Or might they come to be replaced by content marketing and social platforms?

What value is there in having a website in today’s frenzied social content super highway? It might seem oddly simplistic, but the question is relevant.

With recent high profile cases leading to public outcry for standardised procedures, the subject of online abuse has rarely found itself under such a spotlight.

How can online abuse be reported and managed? Is it even possible? What are the right questions to ask? Where should the burden of responsibility rest? Government, police and relevant authorities? Website Owners? Internet Service Providers? Another body?

Change is often met with a wall of anguished screams, especially online when high volume platforms are concerned – namely Facebook and Twitter. Changing something as important in so many digital photography lives as Flickr, that was bound to be a challenge.